Great burned Anglo-Irish houses dot the landscape of Ireland. This explains why.
I would go day after day to read among the ruins of the big house beside the road. It was quiet and mysterious. The weeds had made a riot of the garden, but roses still flowered. All I knew about the big house was that at some time during the "Trouble" the owners were turned out and the place fired by the Irregulars. There was not far from the house, in a shrubbery, the remains of an ancient wall and tower, all that was left of a fortress. The place had evidently been occupied for centuries.
The dead house began to fascinate me. I would prowl about in the ruins looking at the blackened walls and the faded wall-paper, the places where pictures had hung, the staring windows, doors which led nowhere, stairs that ended in mid-air; and I would wonder what kind of people lived there and what they had done to deserve this.
I asked questions about it and bit by bit pieced together its history; and in the story of that piece of land was also the history of Ireland.
When in the year A.D. 1171 Henry II became Ireland's first absentee landlord, he left behind him a Norman baron (Welsh on his mother's side, like so many of the original invaders) in possession of his estate. The six-foot thick boundary wall in the shrubbery is all that remains of the castle built by this settler.
This Norman family settled down and developed along that line of least resistance which had it not violently conflicted with the ideas of England's rulers might have solved the "Irish Question" centuries ago. In the course of a few generations this family became, to all appearances, Irish. It spoke Irish, intermarried with Irish families, observed the Brehon law, adopted the Irish system of fosterage, and changed its name to-- say-- MacFerris. Such union between the English and the Irish was hateful to Westminster. Such families were known as the "degenerate English." The Statute of Kilkenny was launched against them in 1367, forbidding them on pain of high treason to intermarry with the Irish, speak Irish, or adopt the speech or dress or customs of the Irish. The MacFerris family, however, managed to weather the storms of three centuries, until a bright light of burning in the sky announced the arrival of Cromwell on his war of extermination. Then the MacFerris family was driven into the hills. That was in the year A.D. 1653.
English and Irish versions of what Cromwell did at Drogheda
The new owner of the estate was one of Cromwell's Puritan followers, a soldier named-- say-- Buckley. He took the MacFerris demesne, built himself a suitable house, and established himself on the land. He weathered the Stuart storms as successfully as his predecessor had weathered those of Plantagenet times.
The Georgian age found these Buckleys no longer humble ex-service men of Cromwell's but distinguished country gentlemen with Gainsboroughs and Romneys on their walls, good wine in the cellar, and a stable full of noble horses. The house of their ancestors had made way for an austere square mansion with a portico upheld by Corinthian columns. They were, by comparison with others, good landlords and well liked.
They disappeared for long periods into England, where their rents were sent to them. Here the process of Irishing which had penalized the Plantagenet settlers was a kind of social charm. The Buckleys when in England were considered to be delightfully Irish. They were expected to do and say funny things and to be generally a bit mad. But they could not speak Gaelic and they were staunch Protestants. (When they returned to Ireland their tenants thought of them as English.)
They sent sons into the Army and the Church. A Buckley distinguished himself in the Crimea. Another became an English bishop. In Victoria's reign-- so glorious and well-fed for England, so miserable and starved for Ireland-- the Buckleys heard the first faint rumble of rebellion, but they rode to hounds right through it. They served in the South African War, and a Buckley commanded an English yeomanry regiment during the war with Germany.
Anglo-Irish and Irish under the British
This was the Colonel Buckley who had come over to see his agent in 1922. He discovered that the warning rumble of Fenianism through which his great-grandfather and his father had hunted now swept with the force of a gale throughout Ireland The young men of his estate seemed to belong to a secret society. He saw strange slogans chalked up on the walls. His tenants had the appearance of spies. One night, he was sitting at dinner in the big Georgian room, congratulating himself perhaps, that the good deeds of his ancestors had preserved his Irish fortunes, when there was a tramp of feet as a band of Irregulars walked in, tough young men with caps pulled over their eyes. He had time to notice among them the sons of one or two of his tenants.
"You've got your rosary?" one began from force of habit; then, remembering that the Colonel was a Protestant he smiled grimly and said: "Come now to the top of the hill."
The Buckleys, like most of the unfortunate Anglo-Irish, may at times have been stupid but they were never cowardly. The Colonel, knowing at once that he was to be murdered, and knowing too that argument was pointless, asked to be allowed to find a hat. They marched him to the top of his own hill in the dark. Here a huge young man stood over him.
"Who does that demesne belong to, Colonel Buckley?" he asked.
"It belongs to me," said the Colonel.
"Oh; it does?" replied the young man with deep irony. "Well, now, take a good look at me while you can! that demesne belonged to me before you came over with Cromwell. My name's MacFerris! Now down with ye on your knees...."
The ruins of Puxley Manor. For its story, which is much like the one in this description, read Hungry Hill by Daphne DuMaurier.
But the Colonel was not shot. At the last moment the men, becoming alarmed by a scouting-party of Free State troops, fled, leaving the middle-aged Anglo-Irishman kneeling on the grass without the slightest idea that Cromwellian had met Plantagenet. As the Colonel rose he looked down and saw that his house was on fire. He then and there swore never to set foot on Irish soil; and he kept his vow. He retired to an English cathedral city.
So I go day after day to read among the ruins of the house beside the road. There is something as inevitable as Greek tragedy in the thought of a MacFerris, probably a farm-labourer, swooping down with the indignation of centuries behind him to snatch a brief vengeance at the pistol's point. If this long memory is not nationalism what is it?
There is not a great estate in Ireland owned by one of Cromwell's settlers which had not always had a ghostly other owner in the memory of the common people.
--H.V. Morton (1892-1979), In Search of Ireland (1930). Methuen & Co. London.
This story is still going on. Here is one old Irish estate which was repurchased by descendants of the original family.
Comments